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Covering vast geographical and cultural areas, the wingspan of Kenneth White’s poetic programme covers a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study. The chapter examines White’s work, focusing on the interconnectedness and intertwining of the poetic subject with the natural world. It analyses White’s concepts of intellectual nomadism and the open world by means of tracing the main philosophical influences that inform his writing. It examines the poet’s explorations of landscape and mindscape, stemming from philosophical contemplation and spiritual realisation. The analysis attempts to follow the poet’s mapping of extensive territories of the globe in the context of the problem of proper dwelling, investigating the ways in which it mediates place in a phenomenological relationship. It explores the poetic subject’s self-identification with its surroundings, which stresses the interfolding of a mind with the natural world. Finally, the chapter also considers the syncretism of poetic forms employed by White, ranging from haiku to ‘diamond’ poems, to polyphonic itinerary poems.

This chapter makes the case for the interplay between modernist poetry and academic and popular geography from the late nineteenth century to the early 1940s. It develops the term geopoetics to capture the transnational geographical orientation of the work by American poets the book considers and to reflect the geopolitical dimensions of modernist poetry’s “mixing up” of conventional global geography. It also argues for a more prominent place for the genre of poetry in discussions of transnationalism.

Drawing on (post-)phenomenological and geopoetic perspectives, the introduction explains the book’s interest in considering islands at the intersection of material and poetic production on the one hand, and aesthetic experience of the phenomenal world on the other. It suggests that the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space, and that fictional and non-fictional representations of islands negotiate these perceptual challenges. It thereby explains how The Aesthetic of Island Space complicates the common account of islands as discrete shapes, geometrical abstractions, and easily understandable images. Instead, it foregrounds the importance of water, mobility, and a range of dynamic geo(morpho)logical and poetic processes in the figuration of islands. The introduction ends by discussing the significance of considering islands in relation to an ‘aesthetics of the earth’ (DeLoughrey and Handley) and a poetics of the material world.

The texts examined in Chapter 4 explore islands in geo(morpho)logical space-time. The chapter begins by discussing how the relational poetics of Darwin’s and Wallace’s writings ask readers to reimagine planetary space as a discontinuous multiplicity of shifting islands. The notion of a geopoetic resonance between the material energies of the physical world and the poetic energies of language guides the analyses of three literary responses to Darwin, Wallace, and their successors. H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and ‘Aepyornis Island’ (1894) figure islands as beleaguered territories haunted by the spectre of human extinction. However, their geopoetic descriptions of volcanism and coral suspend these evolutionary narratives. A century later, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide explores the radical poetic implications of Darwin and Wallace’s archipelagic thinking. In the novel, the human element intersects with other living forms, physical geography, and textual spaces to form a mutable landscape shaped by conflicts.